Greg Baum

Andrew Bogut is a formidable basketballer, who played a manful role in Australia's gallant tilt at the windmills in Rio. He is also, more than most sportspeople, socially engaged. I could say, quirkily, doubtfully, provocatively engaged, but he would say the same of my world view.

It is the emails that should be sounding an alarm. A whole tranche of them. No, make that a trove; Wikileaks would. They've been flooding in for weeks. Names. Numbers. Names linked to numbers, like a code.

The Bulldog grand final balm will be at work on Friday night when key people from the three different - and not always amicable - administrations since the club was declared clinically dead in 1989 gather at the home of president Peter Gordon to rejoice together.

For two months, North Melbourne were clinging on. For two more hours at the Adelaide Oval, they clung some more. But like a man with his fingernails dug into the ledge of a cliff, they had to let go eventually.

It's September. It's finals. It's that archetypal new season, on elevated terms, before heaving crowds. It's Hawthorn time. It's Geelong time. It's time for Geelong-Hawthorn. If ever there were two teams to awaken one another to their vocations, it is these two.

When Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie announced their mission to loosen the nexus between gambling and sport in Australia on Thursday, it was not hard to imagine that in the offices of some corporate bookies, the first thing they did was to frame a market on the likelihood of the politicians' success, complete with cash-back options and bonus bets.